Dotted at intervals throughout society are the people endowed with the
faculty for “getting up things”. They are dauntless people, filled with
the power of driving lesser and deeper reluctant spirits before them;
remorseless to the timid, carneying to the stubborn.
Of such was Mrs. Carteret, with powers matured in hill-stations in
India, mellowed by much voyaging in P. and O. steamers. Not even an
environment as unpromising as that of Enniscar in its winter torpor had
power to dismay her. A public whose artistic tastes had hitherto been
nourished upon travelling circuses, Nationalist meetings, and missionary
magic lanterns in the Wesleyan schoolhouse, was, she argued, practically
virgin soil, and would ecstatically respond to any form of cultivation.
“I know there’s not much talent to be had,” she said combatively to her
husband, “but we’ll just black our faces, and call ourselves the Green
Coons or something, and it will be all right!”
“Dashed if I’ll black my face again,” said Captain Carteret; “I call it
rot trying to get up anything here. There’s no one to do anything.”
“Well, there’s ourselves and little Taylour” (“little Taylour,” it may
be explained, was Captain Carteret’s subaltern), “that’s two banjoes and
a bones anyhow; and Freddy Alexander, and there’s your dear friend Fanny
Fitz--she’ll be home in a few days, and these two big Hamilton girls--”
“Oh, Lord!” ejaculated Captain Carteret.
“Oh, yes!” continued Mrs. Carteret, unheedingly, “and there’s Mr.
Gunning; he’ll come if Fanny Fitz does.”
“He’ll not be much advantage when he does come,” said Captain Carteret
spitefully.
“Oh, he sings,” said Mrs. Carteret, arranging her neat small fringe at
the glass--“rather a good voice. You needn’t be afraid, my dear, I’ll
arrange that the fascinating Fanny shall sit next you!”
Upon this somewhat unstable basis the formation of the troupe of Green
Coons was undertaken. Mrs. Carteret took off her coat to the work, or
rather, to be accurate, she put on a fur-lined one, and attended a
Nationalist meeting in the Town Hall to judge for herself how the voices
carried. She returned rejoicing--she had sat at the back of the hall,
and had not lost a syllable of the oratory, even during sundry heated
episodes, discreetly summarised by the local paper as “interruption”.
The Town Hall was chartered, superficially cleansed, and in the space of
a week the posters had gone forth.
By what means it was accomplished that Rupert Gunning should attend the
first rehearsal he did not exactly understand; he found himself enmeshed
in a promise to meet every one else at the Town Hall with tea at the
Carterets’ afterwards. Up to this point the fact that he was to appear
before the public with a blackened face had been diplomatically withheld
from him, and an equal diplomacy was shown on his arrival in the
deputing of Miss Fitzroy to break the news to him.
“Mrs. Carteret says it’s really awfully becoming,” said Fanny,
breathless and brilliant from assiduous practice of a hornpipe under
Captain Carteret’s tuition, “and as for trouble! We might as well make a
virtue of necessity in this incredibly dirty place; my hands are black
already, and I’ve only swept the stage!”
She was standing at the edge of the platform that was to serve as the
stage, looking down at him, and it may be taken as a sufficient guide to
his mental condition that his abhorrence of the prospect for himself was
swallowed up by fury at the thought of it for her.
“Are you--do you mean to tell me you are going to dance _with a black
face_?” he demanded in bitter and incongruous wrath.
“No, I’m going to dance with Captain Carteret!” replied Fanny
frivolously, “and so can you if you like!”
She was maddeningly pretty as she smiled down at him, with her bright
hair roughened, and the afterglow of the dance alight in her eyes and
cheeks. Nevertheless, for one whirling moment, the old Adam, an Adam
blissfully unaware of the existence of Eve, asserted himself in Rupert.
He picked up his cap and stick without a word, and turned towards the
door. There, however, he was confronted by Mrs. Carteret, tugging at a
line of chairs attached to a plank, like a very small bird with a very
large twig. To refuse the aid that she immediately demanded was
impossible, and even before the future back row of the sixpennies had
been towed to its moorings, he realised that hateful as it would be to
stay and join in these distasteful revels, it would be better than going
home and thinking about them.
From this the intelligent observer may gather that absence had had its
traditional, but by no means invariable, effect upon the heart of Mr.
Gunning, and, had any further stimulant been needed, it had been
supplied in the last few minutes by the aggressive and possessive manner
of Captain Carteret.
The rehearsal progressed after the manner of amateur rehearsals. The
troupe, with the exception of Mr. Gunning, who remained wrapped in
silence, talked irrepressibly, and quite inappropriately to their rôle
as Green Coons. Freddy Alexander and Mr. Taylour bear-fought untiringly
for possession of the bones and the position of Corner Man; Mrs.
Carteret alone had a copy of the music that was to be practised, and in
consequence, the company hung heavily over her at the piano in a
deafening and discordant swarm. The two tall Hamiltons, hitherto
speechless by nature and by practice, became suddenly exhilarated at
finding themselves in the inner circle of the soldiery, and bubbled with
impotent suggestions and reverential laughter at the witticisms of Mr.
Taylour. Fanny Fitz and Captain Carteret finally removed themselves to a
grimy corner behind the proscenium, and there practised, _sotto voce_,
the song with banjo accompaniment that was to culminate in the hornpipe.
Freddy Alexander had gone forth to purchase a pack of cards, in the
futile hope that he could prevail upon Mrs. Carteret to allow him to
inflict conjuring tricks upon the audience.
“As if there were anything on earth that bored people as much as card
tricks!” said that experienced lady to Rupert Gunning. “Look here,
_would_ you mind reading over these riddles, to see which you’d like to
have to answer. Now, here’s a local one. I’ll ask it--‘Why am dis room
like de Enniscar Demesne?’--and then _you’ll_ say, ‘Because dere am so
many pretty little deers in it’!”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that!” said Rupert hastily, alarmed as well
as indignant; “I’m afraid I really must go now--”
He had to pass by Fanny Fitz on his way out of the hall. There was
something vexed and forlorn about him, and, being sympathetic, she
perceived it, though not its cause.
“You’re deserting us!” she said, looking up at him.
“I have an appointment,” he said stiffly, his glance evading hers, and
resting on Captain Carteret’s well-clipped little black head.
Some of Fanny’s worst scrapes had been brought about by her incapacity
to allow any one to part from her on bad terms, and, moreover, she liked
Rupert Gunning. She cast about in her mind for something conciliatory to
say to him.
“When are you going to show me the cob that you bought at the Horse
Show?”
The olive branch thus confidently tendered had a somewhat withering
reception.
“The cob I bought at the Horse Show?” Mr. Gunning repeated with an
increase of rigidity, “Oh, yes--I got rid of it.”
He paused; the twanging of Captain Carteret’s banjo bridged the interval
imperturbably.
“Why had you to get rid of it?” asked Fanny, still sympathetic.
“She was a failure!” said Rupert vindictively; “I made a fool of myself
in buying her!”
Fanny looked at him sideways from under her lashes.
“And I had counted on your giving me a mount on her now and then!”
Rupert forgot his wrath, forgot even the twanging banjo.
“I’ve just got another cob,” he said quickly; “she jumps very well, and
if you’d like to hunt her next Tuesday--”
“Oh, thanks awfully, but Captain Carteret has promised me a mount for
next Tuesday!” said the perfidious Fanny.
Mrs. Carteret, on her knees by a refractory footlight, watched with
anxiety Mr. Gunning’s abrupt departure from the room.
“Fanny!” she said severely, “what have you been doing to that man?”
“Oh, nothing!” said Fanny.
“If you’ve put him off singing I’ll never forgive you!” continued Mrs.
Carteret, advancing on her knees to the next footlight.
“I tell you I’ve done nothing to him,” said Fanny Fitz guiltily.
“Give me the hammer!” said Mrs. Carteret. “Have I eyes, or have I not?”
“He’s awfully keen about her!” Mrs. Carteret said that evening to her
husband. “Bad temper is one of the worst signs. Men in love are always
cross.”
“Oh, he’s a rotter!” said Captain Carteret conclusively.
In the meantime the object of this condemnation was driving his ten
Irish miles home, by the light of a frosty full moon. Between the shafts
of his cart a trim-looking mare of about fifteen hands trotted lazily,
forging, shying, and generally comporting herself in a way only possible
to a grass-fed animal who has been in the hands of such as Mr. William
Fennessy. The thick and dingy mane that had hung impartially on each
side of her neck, now, together with the major portion of her voluminous
tail, adorned the manure heap in the rear of the Fennessy public-house.
The pallid fleece in which she had been muffled had given place to a
polished coat of iron-grey, that looked black in the moonlight. A week
of over-abundant oats had made her opinionated, but had not, so far,
restored to her the fine lady nervousness that had landed her in the
window of the hat shop.
Rupert laid the whip along her fat sides with bitter disfavour. She was
a brute in harness, he said to himself, her blemished fetlock was uglier
than he had at first thought, and even though she had yesterday schooled
over two miles of country like an old stager, she was too small to carry
him, and she was not, apparently, wanted to carry any one else. Here the
purchase received a very disagreeable cut on the neck that interrupted
her speculations as to the nature of the shadows of telegraph-posts. To
have bought two useless horses in four months was pretty average bad
luck. It was also pretty bad luck to have been born a fool. Reflection
here became merged in the shapeless and futile fumings of a man badly in
love and preposterously jealous.
Known only to the elect among entertainment promoters are the methods
employed by Mrs. Carteret to float the company of The Green Coons. The
fact remains that on the appointed night the chosen troupe,
approximately word-perfect, and with spirits something chastened by
stage fright, were assembled in the clerk’s room of the Enniscar Town
Hall, round a large basin filled horribly with a compound of burnt cork
and water.
“It’s not as bad as it looks!” said Mrs. Carteret, plunging in her hands
and heroically smearing her face with a mass of black oozy matter
believed to be a sponge. “It’s quite becoming if you do it thoroughly.
Mind, all of you, get it well into your ears and the roots of your
hair!”
The Hamiltons, giggling wildly, submitted themselves to the
ministrations of Freddy Alexander, and Mrs. Carteret, appallingly
transformed into a little West Indian coolie woman, applied the sponge
to the shrinking Fanny Fitz.
“Will you do Mr. Gunning, Fanny?” she whispered into one of the ears
that she had conscientiously blackened. “I think he’d bear it better
from you!”
“I shall do nothing of the kind!” replied Fanny, with a dignity somewhat
impaired by her ebon countenance and monstrous green turban.
“Why not?”
Mrs. Carteret’s small neat features seemed unnaturally sharpened, and
her eyes and teeth glittered in her excitement.
“For goodness’ sake, take your awful little black face away, Mabel!”
exclaimed Fanny hysterically. “It quite frightens me! I’m _very_ angry
with Mr. Gunning! I’ll tell you why some other time.”
“Well, don’t forget you’ve got to say ‘Buck up, Sambo!’ to him after
he’s sung his song, and you may fight with him as much as you like
afterwards,” said Mrs. Carteret, hurrying off to paint glaring
vermilion mouths upon the loudly protesting Hamiltons.
During these vicissitudes, Rupert Gunning, arrayed in a green
swallow-tailed calico coat, short white cotton trousers, and a skimpy
nigger wig, presented a pitiful example of the humiliations which the
allied forces of love and jealousy can bring upon the just. Fanny Fitz
has since admitted that, in spite of the wrath that burned within her,
the sight of Mr. Gunning morosely dabbing his long nose with the
repulsive sponge that was shared by the troupe, almost moved her to
compassion.
A pleasing impatience was already betraying itself in cat-calls and
stampings from the sixpenny places, and Mrs. Carteret, flitting like a
sheep dog round her flock, arranged them in couples and drove them
before her on to the stage, singing in chorus, with a fair assumption of
hilarity, “As we go marching through Georgia”.
For Fanny Fitz the subsequent proceedings became merged in a nightmare
of blinding heat and glare, made actual only by poignant anxiety as to
the length of her green skirt. The hope that she might be unrecognisable
was shattered by the yell of “More power, Miss Fanny!” that crested the
thunderous encore evoked by her hornpipe with Captain Carteret, and the
question of the skirt was decided by the fact that her aunts, in the
front row, firmly perused their programmes from the beginning of her
dance to its conclusion.
The entertainment went with varying success after the manner of its
kind. The local hits and personal allusions, toilfully compiled and
ardently believed in, were received in damping silence, while Rupert
Gunning’s song, of the truculent order dedicated to basses, and sung by
him with a face that would have done credit to Othello, received an
ovation that confirmed Captain Carteret in his contempt for country
audiences. The performance raged to its close in a “Cake Walk,” to the
inspiring strains of “Razors a-flying through the air,” and the curtain
fell on what the Enniscar _Independent_ described cryptically as “a
_tout ensemble à la conversazione_ that was refreshingly unique”.
“Five minutes more and I should have had heat apoplexy!” said Mrs.
Carteret, hurling her turban across the clerk’s room, “but it all went
splendidly! Empty that basin out of the window, somebody, and give me
the vaseline. The last time I blacked my face it was covered with red
spots for a week afterwards because I used soap instead of vaseline!”
Rupert Gunning approached Fanny with an open note in his hand.
“I’ve had this from your aunt,” he said, handing it to her; it was
decorated with sooty thumb marks, to which Fanny’s black claw
contributed a fresh batch as she took it, but she read it without a
smile.
It was to the effect that the heat of the room had been too much for the
elder Misses Fitzroy, and they had therefore gone home, but as Mr.
Gunning had to pass their gate perhaps he would be kind enough to drive
their niece home.
“Oh--” said Fanny, in tones from which dismay was by no means
eliminated. “How stupid of Aunt Rachel!”
“I’m afraid there seems no way out of it for you,” said Rupert
offendedly.
A glimpse of their two wrathful black faces in the glass abruptly
checked Fanny’s desire to say something crushing. At this juncture she
would rather have died than laughed.
Burnt cork is not lightly to be removed at the first essay, and when,
half an hour later, Fanny Fitz, with a pale and dirty face, stood under
the dismal light of the lamp outside the Town Hall, waiting for Mr.
Gunning’s trap, she had the pleasure of hearing a woman among the
loiterers say compassionately:--
“God help her, the crayture! She looks like a servant that’d be bate out
with work!”
Mr. Gunning’s new cob stood hearkening with flickering ears to the
various commotions of the street--she understood them all perfectly
well, but her soul being unlifted by reason of oats, she chose to resent
them as impertinences. Having tolerated with difficulty the instalment
of Miss Fitzroy in the trap, she started with a flourish, and pulled
hard until clear of the town and its flaring public-houses. On the open
road, with nothing more enlivening than the dark hills, half-seen in the
light of the rising moon, she settled down. Rupert turned to his silent
companion. He had become aware during the evening that something was
wrong, and his own sense of injury was frightened into the background.
“What do you think of my new buy?” he said pacifically, “she’s a good
goer, isn’t she?”
“Very,” replied Fanny.
Silence again reigned. One or two further attempts at conversation met
with equal discouragement. The miles passed by. At length, as the mare
slackened to walk up a long hill, Rupert said with a voice that had the
shake of pent-up injury:--
“I’ve been wondering what I’ve done to be put into Coventry like this!”
“I thought you probably wouldn’t care to speak to me!” was Fanny’s
astonishing reply, delivered in tones of ice.
“I!” he stammered, “not care to speak to _you_! You ought to know--”
“Yes, indeed, I do know!” broke in Fanny, passing from the frigid to the
torrid zone with characteristic speed, “I know what a _failure_ your
horse-dealing at the Dublin Show was! I’ve heard how you bought my mare,
and had her shot the same night, because you wouldn’t take the trouble
even to go and look at her after the poor little thing was hurt! Oh! I
can’t bear even to _think_ of it!”
Rupert Gunning remained abjectly and dumfoundedly silent.
“And then,” continued Fanny, whirling on to the final point of her
indictment, “you pretended to Captain Carteret and me that the horse you
had bought was ‘a common brute,’ _a cob for carting_, and you said the
other night that you had made a fool of yourself over it! I didn’t know
then all about it, but I do now. Captain Carteret heard about it from
the dealer in Dublin. Even the dealer said it was a pity you hadn’t
given the mare a chance!”
“It’s all perfectly true,” said Rupert, in a low voice.
A soft answer, so far from turning away wrath, frequently inflames it.
“Then I think there’s no more to be said!” said Fanny hotly.
There was silence. They had reached the top of the hill, and the grey
mare began to trot.
“Well, there’s just one thing I should like to say,” said Rupert
awkwardly, his breath coming very short, “I couldn’t help everything
going wrong about the mare. It was just my bad luck. I only bought her
to please you. They told me she couldn’t get right after the accident.
What was the good of my going to look at her? I wanted to cross in the
boat with you. Whatever I did I did for you. I would do anything in the
world for you--”
It was at this crucial moment that there arose suddenly from the dim
grey road in front of them a slightly greyer shadow, a shadow that
limped amid the clanking of chains. The Connemara mare, now masquerading
as a County Cork cob, asked for nothing better. If it were a ghost, she
was legitimately entitled to flee from it; if, as was indeed the case,
it was a donkey, she made a point of shying at donkeys. She realised
that, by a singular stroke of good fortune, the reins were lying in
loops on her back.
A snort, a sideways bound, a couple of gleeful kicks on the dashboard,
and she was away at full gallop, with one rein under her tail, and a
pleasant open road before her.
“It’s all right!” said Rupert, recovering his balance by a
hair-breadth, and feeling in his heart that it was all wrong, “the
Craffroe Hill will stop her. Hold on to the rail.”
Fanny said nothing. It was, indeed, all that she could do to keep her
seat in the trap, with which the rushing road was playing cup and ball;
she was, besides, not one of the people who are conversational in
emergencies. When an animal, as active and artful as the Connemara mare,
is going at some twenty miles an hour, with one of the reins under its
tail, endeavours to detach the rein are not much avail, and when the
tail is still tender from recent docking, they are a good deal worse
than useless. Having twice nearly fallen on his head, Rupert abandoned
the attempt and prayed for the long stiff ascent of the Craffroe Hill.
It came swiftly out of the grey moonlight. At its foot another road
forked to the right; instead of facing the hill that led to home and
stable, the mare swung into the side road, with one wheel up on the
grass, and the cushions slipping from the seat, and Rupert, just saving
the situation with the left rein that remained to him, said to himself
that they were in for a bad business.
For a mile they swung and clattered along it, with the wind striking and
splitting against their faces like a cold and tearing stream of water; a
light wavered and disappeared across the pallid fields to the left, a
group of starveling trees on a hill slid up into the skyline behind
them, and at last it seemed as if some touch of self-control, some
suggestion of having had enough of the joke, was shortening the mare’s
grasping stride. The trap pitched more than ever as she came up into the
shafts and back into her harness; she twisted suddenly to the left into
a narrow lane, cleared the corner by an impossible fluke, and Fanny Fitz
was hurled ignominiously on to Rupert Gunning’s lap. Long briars and
twigs struck them from either side, the trap bumped in craggy ruts and
slashed through wide puddles, then reeled irretrievably over a heap of
stones and tilted against the low bank to the right.
Without any exact knowledge of how she got there, Fanny found herself on
her hands and knees in a clump of bracken on top of the bank; Rupert was
already picking himself out of rugs and other jetsam in the field below
her, and the mare was proceeding up the lane at a disorderly trot,
having jerked the trap on to its legs again from its reclining position.
Fanny was lifted down into the lane; she told him that she was not hurt,
but her knees shook, her hands trembled, and the arm that was round her
tightened its clasp in silence. When a man is strongly moved by
tenderness and anxiety and relief, he can say little to make it known;
he need not--it is known beyond all telling by the one other person whom
it concerns. She felt suddenly that she was safe, that his heart was
torn for her sake, and that the tension of the last ten minutes had been
great. It went through her with a pang, and her head swayed against his
arm. In a moment she felt his lips on her hair, on her temple, and the
oldest, the most familiar of all words of endearment was spoken at her
ear. She recovered herself, but in a new world. She tried to walk on up
the lane, but stumbled in the deep ruts and found the supporting arm
again ready at need. She did not resist it.
A shrill neigh arose in front of them. The mare had pulled up at a
closed gate, and was apparently apostrophising some low farm buildings
beyond it. A dog barked hysterically, the door of a cowshed burst open,
and a man came out with a lantern.
“Oh, I know now where we are!” cried Fanny wildly, “it’s Johnny
Connolly’s! Oh, Johnny, Johnny Connolly, we’ve been run away with!”
“For God’s sake!” responded Johnny Connolly, standing stock still in his
amazement, “is that Miss Fanny?”
“Get hold of the mare,” shouted Rupert, “or she’ll jump the gate!”
Johnny Connolly advanced, still calling upon his God, and the mare
uttered a low but vehement neigh.
“Ye’re deshtroyed, Miss Fanny! And Mr. Gunning, the Lord save us! Ye’re
killed the two o’ ye! What happened ye at all? Woa, gerr’l, woa,
gerrlie! Ye’d say she knew me, the crayture.”
The mare was rubbing her dripping face and neck against the farmer’s
shoulder, with hoarse whispering snorts of recognition and pleasure. He
held his lantern high to look at her.
“Musha, why wouldn’t she know me!” he roared, “sure it’s yer own mare,
Miss Fanny! ’Tis the Connemara mare I thrained for ye! And may the divil
sweep and roast thim that has it told through all the counthry that she
was killed!”
A GRAND FILLY
I am an Englishman. I say this without either truculence or
vainglorying, rather with humility--a mere Englishman, who submits his
Plain Tale from the Western Hills with the conviction that the Kelt who
may read it will think him more mere than ever.
I was in Yorkshire last season when what is trivially called “the cold
snap” came upon us. I had five horses eating themselves silly all the
time, and I am not going to speak of it. I don’t consider it a subject
to be treated lightly. It was in about the thickest of it that I heard
from a man I know in Ireland. He is a little old horse-coping sportsman
with a red face and iron-grey whiskers, who has kept hounds all his
life; or, rather, he has always had hounds about, on much the same
conditions that other men have rats. The rats are indubitably there, and
feed themselves variously, and so do old Robert Trinder’s “Rioters,”
which is their _nom de guerre_ in the County Corkerry (the few who know
anything of the map of Ireland may possibly identify the two counties
buried in this cryptogram).
I meet old Robert most years at the Dublin Horse Show, and every now and
then he has sold me a pretty good horse, so when he wrote and renewed a
standing invitation, assuring me that there was open weather, and that
he had a grand four-year-old filly to sell, I took him at his word, and
started at once. The journey lasted for twenty-eight hours, going hard
all the time, and during the last three of them there were no
foot-warmers and the cushions became like stones enveloped in mustard
plasters. Old Trinder had not sent to the station for me, and it was
pelting rain, so I had to drive seven miles in a thing that only exists
south of the Limerick Junction, and is called a “jingle”. A jingle is a
square box of painted canvas with no back to it, because, as was
luminously explained to me, you must have some way to get into it, and I
had to sit sideways in it, with my portmanteau bucking like a
three-year-old on the seat opposite to me. It fell out on the road twice
going uphill. After the second fall my hair tonic slowly oozed forth
from the seams, and added a fresh ingredient to the smells of the grimy
cushions and the damp hay that furnished the machine. My hair tonic
costs eight-and-sixpence a bottle.
There is probably not in the United Kingdom a worse-planned entrance
gate than Robert Trinder’s. You come at it obliquely on the side of a
crooked hill, squeeze between its low pillars with an inch to spare
each side, and immediately drop down a yet steeper hill, which lasts for
the best part of a quarter of a mile. The jingle went swooping and
jerking down into the unknown, till, through the portholes on either
side of the driver’s legs, I saw Lisangle House. It had looked decidedly
better in large red letters at the top of old Robert’s notepaper than it
did at the top of his lawn, being no more than a square yellow box of a
house, that had been made a fool of by being promiscuously trimmed with
battlements. Just as my jingle tilted me in backwards against the flight
of steps, I heard through the open door a loud and piercing yell;
following on it came the thunder of many feet, and the next instant a
hound bolted down the steps with a large plucked turkey in its mouth.
Close in its wake fled a brace of puppies, and behind them, variously
armed, pursued what appeared to be the staff of Lisangle House. They
went past me in full cry, leaving a general impression of dirty aprons,
flying hair, and onions, and I feel sure that there were bare feet
somewhere in it. My carman leaped from his perch and joined in the
chase, and the whole party swept from my astonished gaze round or into a
clump of bushes. At this juncture I was not sorry to hear Robert
Trinder’s voice greeting me as if nothing unusual were occurring.
[Illustration: ROBERT’S AUNT]
“Upon me honour, it’s the Captain! You’re welcome, sir, you’re welcome!
Come in, come in, don’t mind the horse at all; he’ll eat the grass there
as he’s done many a time before! When the gerr’ls have old Amazon cot
they’ll bring in your things.”
(Perhaps I ought to mention at once that Mr. Trinder belongs to the
class who are known in Ireland as “Half-sirs”. You couldn’t say he was a
gentleman, and he himself wouldn’t have tried to say so. But, as a
matter of fact, I have seen worse imitations.)
Robert was delighted to see me, and I had had a whisky-and-soda and been
shown two or three more hound puppies before it occurred to him to
introduce me to his aunt. I had not expected an aunt, as Robert is well
on the heavenward side of sixty; but there she was: she made me think of
a badly preserved Egyptian mummy with a brogue. I am always a little
afraid of my hostess, but there was something about Robert’s aunt that
made me know I was a worm. She came down to dinner in a bonnet and black
kid gloves--a circumstance that alone was awe-inspiring. She sat
entrenched at the head of the table behind an enormous dish of thickly
jacketed potatoes, and, though she scorned to speak to Robert or me, she
kept up a sort of whispered wrangle with the parlour-maid all the time.
The latter’s red hair hung down over her shoulders--and at intervals
over mine also--in horrible luxuriance, and recalled the leading figure
in the pursuit of Amazon; there was, moreover, something about the heavy
boots in which she tramped round the table that suggested that Amazon
had sought sanctuary in the cow-house. I have done some roughing it in
my time, and I am not over-particular, but I admit that it was rather a
shock to meet the turkey itself again, more especially as it was the
sole item of the _menu_. There was no doubt of its identity, as it was
short of a leg, and half the breast had been shaved away. The aunt must
have read my thoughts in my face. She fixed her small implacable eyes on
mine for one quelling instant, then she looked at Robert. Her nephew was
obviously afraid to meet her eye; he coughed uneasily, and handed a
surreptitious potato to the puppy who was sitting under his chair.
“This place is rotten with dogs,” said the aunt; with which announcement
she retired from the conversation, and fell again to the slaughter of
the parlour-maid. I timidly ate my portion of turkey and tried not to
think about the cow-house.
It rained all night. I could hear the water hammering into something
that rang like a gong; and each time I rolled over in the musty trough
of my feather-bed I fractiously asked myself why the mischief they had
left the tap running all night. Next morning the matter was explained
when, on demanding a bath, I was told that “there wasn’t but one in the
house, and ’twas undher the rain-down. But sure ye can have it,” with
which it was dragged in full of dirty water and flakes of whitewash, and
when I got out of it I felt as if I had been through the Bankruptcy
Court.
The day was windy and misty--a combination of weather possible only in
Ireland--but there was no snow, and Robert Trinder, seated at breakfast
in a purple-red hunting coat, dingy drab breeches, and woollen socks,
assured me that it was turning out a grand morning.
I distinctly liked the looks of my mount when Jerry the Whip pulled her
out of the stable for me. She was big and brown, with hindquarters that
looked like jumping; she was also very dirty and obviously underfed.
None the less she was lively enough, and justified Jerry’s prediction
that “she’d be apt to shake a couple or three bucks out of herself when
she’d see the hounds”. Old Robert was on an ugly brute of a yellow
horse, rather like a big mule, who began the day by bucking out of the
yard gate as if he had been trained by Buffalo Bill. It was at this
juncture that I first really respected Robert Trinder; his retention of
his seat was so unstudied, and his command of appropriate epithets so
complete.
Jerry and the hounds awaited us on the road, the latter as mixed a party
as I have ever come across. There were about fourteen couple in all, and
they ranged in style from a short-legged black-and-tan harrier, who had
undoubtedly had an uncle who was a dachshund, to a thing with a head
like a greyhound, a snow-white body, and a feathered stern that would
have been a credit to a setter. In between these extremes came several
broken-haired Welshmen, some dilapidated 24-inch foxhounds, and a lot of
pale-coloured hounds, whose general effect was that of the tablecloth on
which we had eaten our breakfast that morning, being dirty white,
covered with stains that looked like either tea or egg, or both.
“Them’s the old Irish breed,” said Robert, as the yellow horse
voluntarily stopped short to avoid stepping on one of them; “there’s no
better. That Gaylass there would take a line up Patrick Street on a fair
day, and you’d live and die seeing her kill rats.”
I am bound to say I thought it more likely that I should live to see her
and some of her relations killing sheep, judging by their manners along
the road; but we got to Letter cross-roads at last with no more than an
old hen and a wandering cur dog on our collective consciences. The road
and its adjacent fences were thronged with foot people, mostly
strapping young men and boys, in the white flannel coats and slouched
felt hats that strike a stranger with their unusualness and
picturesqueness.
“Do you ever have a row with Land Leaguers?” I asked, noting their
sticks, while the warnings of a sentimental Radical friend as to the
danger of encountering an infuriated Irish peasantry suddenly assumed
plausibility.
“Land League? The dear help ye! Who’d be bothered with the Land League
here?” said Robert, shoving the yellow horse into the crowd; “let the
hounds through, boys, can’t ye? No, Captain, but ’tis Saint November’s
Day, as they call it, a great holiday, and there isn’t a ruffian in the
country but has come out with his blagyard dog to head the fox!”
A grin of guilt passed over the faces of the audience.
“There’s plinty foxes in the hill, Mr. Thrinder,” shouted one of them;
“Dan Murphy says there isn’t a morning but he’d see six or eight o’ them
hoppin’ there.”
“Faith, ’tis thrue for you,” corroborated Dan Murphy. “If ye had thim
gethered in a quarther of ground and dhropped a pin from th’ elements,
‘twould reach one o’ thim!”
(As a matter of fact, I haven’t a notion what Mr. Murphy meant, but that
is what he said, so I faithfully record it.)
The riders were farmers and men of Robert’s own undetermined class, and
there was hardly a horse out who was more than four years old, saving
two or three who were nineteen. Robert pushed through them and turned up
a bohireen--_i.e._, a narrow and incredibly badly made lane--and I
presently heard him cheering the hounds into covert. As to that covert,
imagine a hill that in any civilised country would be called a mountain:
its nearer side a cliff, with just enough slope to give root-hold to
giant furze bushes, its summit a series of rocky and boggy terraces,
trending down at one end into a ravine, and at the other becoming merged
in the depths of an aboriginal wood of low scrubby oak trees. It seemed
as feasible to ride a horse over it as over the roof of York Minster. I
hadn’t the vaguest idea what to do or where to go, and I clave to Jerry
the Whip.
The hounds were scrambling like monkeys along the side of the hill; so
were the country boys with their curs; old Trinder moved parallel with
them along its base. Jerry galloped away to the ravine, and there
dismounting, struggled up by zig-zag cattle paths to the comparative
levels of the summit. I did the same, and was pretty well blown by the
time I got to the top, as the filly scorned the zigzags, and hauled me
up as straight as she could go over the rocks and furze bushes. A few
other fellows had followed us, and we all pursued on along the top of
the hill.
Suddenly Jerry stopped short and held up his hand. A hound spoke below
us, then another, and then came a halloa from Jerry that made the filly
quiver all over. The fox had come up over the low fence that edged the
cliff, and was running along the terrace in front of us. Old Robert
below us--I could almost have chucked a stone on to him--gave an
answering screech, and one by one the hounds fought their way up over
the fence and went away on the line, throwing their tongues in a style
that did one good to hear. Our only way ahead lay along a species of
trench between the hill, on whose steep side we were standing, and the
cliff fence. Jerry kicked the spurs into his good ugly little horse, and
making him jump down into the trench, squeezed along it after the
hounds. But the delay of waiting for them had got the filly’s temper up.
When I faced her at the trench she reared, and whirled round, and
pranced backwards in, considering the circumstances, a highly
discomposing way. The rest of the field crowded through the furze past
me and down into the trench, and twice I thought the mare would land
herself and me on top of one of them. I don’t wonder she was frightened.
I know I was. There was nothing between us and a hundred-foot drop but
this narrow trench and a low, rotten fence, and the fool behaved as
though she wanted to jump it all. I hope no one will ever erect an
equestrian statue in my honour; now that I have experienced the
sensation of ramping over nothing, I find I dislike it. I believe I
might have been there now, but just then a couple of hounds came up, and
before I knew what she was at, the filly had jumped down after them into
the trench as if she had been doing it all her life. I was not long
about picking the others up; the filly could gallop anyhow, and we
thundered on over ground where, had I been on foot, I should have liked
a guide and an alpenstock. At intervals we jumped things made of sharp
stones, and slates, and mud; I don’t know whether they were banks or
walls. Sometimes the horses changed feet on them, sometimes they flew
the whole affair, according to their individual judgment. Sometimes we
were splashing over sedgy patches that looked and felt like buttered
toast, sometimes floundering through stuff resembling an ill-made
chocolate soufflé, whether intended for a ploughed field or a partially
drained bog-hole I could not determine, and all was fenced as carefully
as cricket-pitches. Presently the hounds took a swing to the left and
over the edge of the hill again, and our leader Jerry turned sharp off
after them, down a track that seemed to have been dug out of the face of
the hill. I should have liked to get off and lead, but they did not
give me time, and we suddenly found ourselves joined to Robert Trinder
and his company of infantry, all going hard for the oak wood that I
mentioned before.
It was pretty to see the yellow horse jump. Nothing came amiss to him,
and he didn’t seem able to make a mistake. There was a stone stile out
of a bohireen that stopped every one, and he changed feet on the flag on
top and went down by the steps on the other side. No one need believe
this unless they like, but I saw him do it. The country boys were most
exhilarating. How they got there I don’t know, but they seemed to spring
up before us wherever we went. They cheered every jump, they pulled away
the astounding obstacles that served as gates (such as the end of an
iron bedstead, a broken harrow, or a couple of cartwheels), and their
power of seeing the fox through a stone wall or a hill could only be
equalled by the Röntgen rays. We fought our way through the oak wood,
and out over a boggy bounds ditch into open country at last. The Rioters
had come out of the wood on a screaming scent, and big and little were
running together in a compact body, followed, like the tail of a kite,
by a string of yapping country curs. The country was all grass,
enchantingly green and springy; the jumps were big, yet not too big,
and there were no two alike; the filly pulled hard, but not too hard,
and she was jumping like a deer; I felt that all I had heard of Irish
hunting had not been overstated.
We had been running for half an hour when we checked at a farmhouse; the
yellow horse had been leading the hunt all the time, making a noise like
a steam-engine, but perfectly undefeated, and our numbers were reduced
to five. An old woman and a girl rushed out of the yard to meet us,
screaming like sea-gulls.
“He’s gone south this five minutes! I was out spreadin’ clothes, and I
seen him circling round the Kerry cow, and he as big as a man!” screamed
the girl.
“He was, the thief!” yelled the old woman. “I seen him firsht on the
hill, cringeing behind a rock, and he hardly able to thrail the tail
afther him!”
“Run now, like a good girl, and show me where did he cross the fence,”
said old Robert, puffing and blowing, as with a purple face he hurried
into the yard to collect the hounds, who, like practised foragers, had
already overrun the farmhouse, as was evidenced by an indignant and
shrieking flight of fowls through the open door.
The girl ran, snatching off her red plaid shawl as she went.
“Here’s the shpot now!” she called out, flinging the shawl down on the
fence; “here’s the very way just that he wint! Go south to the gap; I’ll
pull the pole out for ye--this is a cross place.”
The hunt gratefully accepted her good offices. She tore the monstrous
shaft of a cart out of a place that with it was impossible, and without
it was a boggy scramble, and as we began to gallop again, I began to
think there was a good deal to be said in favour of the New Woman.
I suppose we had had another quarter of an hour, when the mist, that had
been hanging about all day, came down on us, and it was difficult to see
more than a field ahead. We had got down on to lower ground, and we were
in a sort of marshy hollow when we were confronted by the most serious
obstacle of the day: a tall and obviously rotten bank clothed in briars,
with sharp stones along its top, a wide ditch in front of it, and a
disgustingly squashy take-off. Robert Trinder and the yellow horse held
their course undaunted: the rest of the field turned as one man, and
went for another way round--I, in my arrogance, followed the Master. The
yellow horse rose out of the soft ground with quiet, indescribable ease,
got a foothold on the side of the bank for his hind legs, and was away
into the next field without pause or mistake.
“Go round, Captain!” shouted Trinder; “it’s a bad place!”
I hardly heard him; I was already putting the filly at it for the second
time. It took about three minutes for her to convince me that she and
Robert were right, and I was wrong, and by that time everybody was out
of sight, swallowed up in the mist. I tried round after the others, and
found their footmarks up a lane and across a field; a loose stone wall
confronted me, and I rode at it confidently; but the filly, soured by
our recent encounter, reared and would have none of it. I tried yet
another way round, and put her at a moderate and seemingly innocuous
bank, at which, with the contrariety of her sex, she rushed at a
thousand miles an hour. It looked somehow as if there might be a bit of
a drop, but the filly had got her beastly blood up, and I have been in a
better temper myself.
She rose to the jump when she was a good six feet from it. I knew she
would not put an iron on it, and I sat down for the drop. It came with a
vengeance. I had a glimpse of a thatched roof below me, and the next
instant we were on it or in it--I don’t know which. It gave way with a
crash of rafters, the mare’s forelegs went in, and I was shot over her
head, rolled over the edge of the roof, and fell on my face into a
manure heap. A yell and a pig burst simultaneously from the door, a calf
followed, and while I struggled up out of my oozy resting-place, I was
aware of the filly’s wild face staring from the door of the shed in
which she so unexpectedly found herself. The broken reins trailed round
her legs, she was panting and shivering, and blood was trickling down
the white blaze on her nose. I got her out through the low doorway with
a little coaxing, and for a moment hardly dared to examine as to the
amount of damage done. She was covered with cobwebs and dirt out of the
roof, and, as I led her forward, she went lame on one foreleg; but
beyond this, and a good many scratches, there was nothing wrong. My own
appearance need not here be dilated upon. I was cleaning off what they
call in Ireland “the biggest of the filth” with a bunch of heather,
when from a cottage a little bit down the lane in which I was standing a
small barelegged child emerged. It saw me, uttered one desperate howl,
and fled back into the house. I abandoned my toilet and led the mare to
the cottage door.
“Is any one in?” I said to the house at large.
A fresh outburst of yells was the sole response; there was a pattering
of bare feet, and somewhere in the smoky gloom a door slammed. It was
clearly a case of “Not at Home” in its conventional sense. I scribbled
Robert Trinder’s name on one of my visiting cards, laid it and half a
sovereign on a table by the door, and started to make my way home.
The south of Ireland is singularly full of people. I do not believe you
can go a quarter of a mile on any given road without meeting some one,
and that some one is sure to be conversationally disposed and glad of
the chance of answering questions. By dint of asking a good many, I
eventually found myself on the high road, with five miles between me and
Lisangle. The mare’s lameness had nearly worn off, and she walked beside
me like a dog. After all, I thought, I had had the best of the day, had
come safely out of what might have been a nasty business, and was
supplied with a story on which to dine out for the rest of my life. My
only anxiety was as to whether I could hope for a bath when I got in--a
luxury that had been hideously converted by the _locale_ of my fall into
a necessity. I led the filly in the twilight down the dark Lisangle
drive, feeling all the complacency of a man who knows he has gone well
in a strange country, and was just at the turn to the yard when I came
upon an extraordinary group. All the women of the household were there,
gathered in a tight circle round some absorbing central fact; all were
shrieking at the tops of their voices, and the turkey cock in the yard
gobbled in response to each shriek.
“Ma’am, ma’am!” I heard, “ye’ll pull the tail off him!”
“Twisht the tink-an now, Bridgie! Twisht it!”
“Holy Biddy! the masther’ll kill us!”
What the deuce were they at? and what was a “tink-an”? I dragged the
filly nearer, and discovered that a hound puppy was the central point of
the tumult, and was being contended for, like the body of Moses, by Miss
Trinder and Bridgie the parlour-maid. Both were seated on the ground
pulling at the puppy for all they were worth; Miss Trinder had him by
the back of his neck and his tail, while Bridgie was dragging--what
_was_ she dragging at? Then I saw that the puppy’s head was jammed in a
narrow-necked tin milk-can, and that, as things were going, he would
wear it, like the Man in the Iron Mask, for the rest of his life.
The small, grim face of Robert’s aunt was scarlet with exertion; her
black bonnet had slipped off her head, and the thin grey hair that was
ordinarily wound round her little skull as tightly as cotton on a reel,
was hanging in scanty wisps from its central knot; nevertheless, she
was, metaphorically speaking, pulling Bridgie across the line every
time. I gave the filly to one of the audience, and took Bridgie’s place
at the “tink-an”. Miss Trinder and I put our backs into it, and suddenly
I found myself flat on mine, with the “tink-an” grasped in both hands
above my head.
A composite whoop of triumph rose from the spectators, and the filly
rose with it. She went straight up on her hind legs, and the next
instant she was away across the drive and into the adjoining field, and,
considering all things, I don’t blame her. We all ran after her. I led,
and the various female retainers strung out after me like a flight of
wild-duck, uttering cries of various encouragement and consternation.
Miss Trinder followed, silent and indomitable, at the heel of the hunt,
and the released puppy, who had also harked in, could be heard throwing
his tongue in the dusky shrubbery ahead of us. It was all exasperatingly
absurd, as things seem to have a habit of being in Ireland. I never felt
more like a fool in my life, and the bitterest part of it was that it
was all I could do to keep ahead of Bridgie. As for the filly, she
waited till we got near her, and then she jumped a five-foot coped wall
into the road, fell, picked herself up, and clattered away into
darkness. At this point I heard Robert’s horn, and sundry confused
shouts and sounds informed me that the filly had run into the hounds.
She was found next day on the farm where she was bred, fifteen miles
away. The farmer brought her back to Lisangle. She had injured three
hounds, upset two old women and a donkey-cart, broken a gate, and
finally, on arriving at the place of her birth, had, according to the
farmer, “fired the divil’s pelt of a kick into her own mother’s
stomach”. Moreover, she “hadn’t as much sound skin on her as would bait
a rat-trap”--I here quote Mr. Trinder--and she had fever in all her
feet.
Of course I bought her. I could hardly do less. I told Robert he might
give her to the hounds, but he sent her over to me in a couple of months
as good as new, and I won the regimental steeplechase cup with her last
April.
A NINETEENTH-CENTURY MIRACLE
Captain “Pat” Naylor, of the --th Dragoons, had the influenza. For three
days he had lain prostrate, a sodden and aching victim to the universal
leveller, and an intolerable nuisance to his wife. This last is perhaps
an over-statement; Mrs. Naylor was in the habit of bearing other
people’s burdens with excellent fortitude, but she felt justly annoyed
that Captain Pat should knock up before they had fairly settled down in
their new quarters, and while yet three of the horses were out of sorts
after the crossing from England.
Pilot, however, was quite fit, a very tranquillising fact, and one that
Mrs. Pat felt was due to her own good sense in summering him on her
father’s broad pastures in Meath, instead of “lugging him to Aldershot
with the rest of the string, as Pat wanted to do,” as she explained to
Major Booth. Major Booth shed a friendly grin upon his fallen comrade,
who lay, a deplorable object, on the horrid velvet-covered sofa peculiar
to indifferent lodgings, and said vaguely that one of his brutes was
right anyhow, and he was going to ride him at Carnfother the next day.
“You’d better come too, Mrs. Pat,” he added; “and if you’ll drive me
I’ll send my chap on with the horses. It’s too far to ride. It’s
fourteen Irish miles off; and fourteen Irish miles is just about the
longest distance I know.”
Carnfother is a village in a remote part of the Co. Cork; it possesses a
small hotel--in Ireland no hostelry, however abject, would demean itself
by accepting the title of inn--a police barrack, a few minor
public-houses, a good many dirty cottages, and an unrivalled collection
of loafers. The stretch of salmon river that gleamed away to the distant
heathery hills afforded the _raison d’être_ of both hotel and loafers,
but the fishing season had not begun, and the attention of both was
therefore undividedly bestowed on Mrs. Naylor and Major Booth. The
former’s cigarette and the somewhat Paradisaic dimensions of her apron
skirt would indeed at any time have rivalled in interest the landing of
a 20-lb. fish, and as she strode into the hotel the bystanders’
ejaculatory piety would have done credit to a revival meeting.
“Well, well, I’ll say nothing for her but that she’s quare!” said the
old landlady, hurrying in from her hens to attend to these rarer birds
whom fortune had sent to her net.
Mrs. Pat’s roan cob had attacked and defeated the fourteen Irish miles
with superfluous zeal, and there were still several minutes before the
hounds could be reasonably expected on the scene. The soda was bad, the
whisky was worse. The sound of a riddle came in with the sunshine
through the open door, and our friends strolled out into the street to
see what was going on. In the centre of a ring of onlookers an old man
was playing, and was, moreover, dancing to his own music, and dancing
with serious, incongruous elegance. Round and round the circle he footed
it, his long thin legs twinkling in absolute accord with the complicated
jig that his long thin fingers were ripping out of the cracked and
raucous fiddle. A very plain, stout young woman, with a heavy red face
and discordantly golden hair, shuffled round after him in a clumsy
pretence of dancing, and as the couple faced Mrs. Pat she saw that the
old man was blind. Steam was rising from his domed bald head, and his
long black hair danced on his shoulders. His face was pale and strange
and entirely self-absorbed. Had Mrs. Pat been in the habit of
instituting romantic parallels between the past and the present she
might have thought of the priests of Baal who danced in probably just
such measures round the cromlechs in the hills above Carnfother; as she
wasn’t, she remarked merely that this was all very well, but that the
old maniac would have to clear out of that before they brought Pilot
round, or there’d be trouble.
There was trouble, but it did not arise from Pilot, but from the
yellow-haired woman’s pertinacious demands for money from Mrs. Naylor.
She had the offensive fluency that comes of long practice in alternate
wheedling and bullying, and although Major Booth had given her a
shilling she continued to pester Mrs. Pat for a further largesse. But,
as it happened, Mrs. Pat’s purse was in her covert coat in the dog-cart,
and Mrs. Pat’s temper was ever within easy reach, and on being too
closely pressed for the one she exhibited the other with a decision that
contracted the ring of bystanders to hear the fun, and loosened the
yellow-haired woman’s language, till unfortunate Major Booth felt that
if he could get her off the field of battle for a sovereign it would be
cheap at the price. The old man continued to walk round and round,
fingering a dumb tune on his fiddle that he did not bow, while the
sunlight glistened hot and bright in his unwinking eyes; there was a
faint smile on his lips, he heard as little as he saw; it was evident
that he was away where “beyond these voices there is peace,” in the
fairy country that his forefathers called the Tir na’n Oge.
At this juncture the note of the horn sounded very sweetly from across
the shining ford of the river. Hounds and riders came splashing up into
the village street, the old man and his daughter were hustled to one
side, and Mrs. Pat’s affability returned as she settled her extremely
smart little person on Pilot’s curveting back, and was instantly aware
that there was nothing present that could touch either of them in looks
or quality. Carnfother was at the extreme verge of the D---- Hounds’
country; there were not more than about thirty riders out, and Mrs. Pat
was not far wrong when she observed to Major Booth that there was not
much class about them. Of the four or five women who were of the field,
but one wore a habit with any pretensions to conformity with the sacred
laws of fashion, and its colour was a blue that, taken in connection
with a red, brass-buttoned waistcoat, reminded the severe critic from
Royal Meath of the head porter at the Shelburne Hotel. So she informed
Major Booth in one of the rare intervals permitted to her by Pilot for
conversation.
“All right,” responded that gentleman, “you wait until you and that
ramping brute of yours get up among the stone walls, and you’ll be jolly
glad if she’ll call a cab for you and see you taken safe home. I tell
you what--you won’t be able to see the way she goes.”
“Rubbish!” said Mrs. Pat, and, whether from sympathy or from a petulant
touch of her heel, Pilot at this moment involved himself in so intricate
a series of plunges and bucks as to preclude further discussion.
The first covert--a small wood on the flank of a hill--was blank, and
the hounds moved on across country to the next draw. It was a land of
pasture, and in every fence was a deep muddy passage, through which the
field splashed in single file with the grave stolidity of the cows by
whom the gaps had been made. Mrs. Pat was feeling horribly bored. Her
escort had joined himself to two of the ladies of the hunt, and though
it was gratifying to observe that one wore a paste brooch in her tie and
the other had an imitation cavalry bit and bridle, with a leather tassel
hanging from her pony’s throat, these things lost their savour when she
had no one with whom to make merry over them. She had left her
sandwiches in the dog-cart, her servant had mistaken whisky for sherry
when he was filling her flask; the day had clouded over, and already one
brief but furious shower had scourged the curl out of her dark fringe
and made the reins slippery.
At last, however, a nice-looking gorse covert was reached, and the
hounds threw themselves into it with promising alacrity. Pilot steadied
himself, and stood with pricked ears, giving an occasional snatch at his
bit, and looking, as no one knew better than his rider, the very picture
of a hunter, while he listened for the first note that should tell of a
find. He had not long to wait. There came a thin little squeal from the
middle of the covert, and a hound flung up out of the thicker gorse and
began to run along a ridge of rock, with head down, and feathering
stern.
“They’ve got him, my lady,” said a young farmer on a rough
three-year-old to Mrs. Pat, as he stuffed his pipe in his pocket.
“That’s Patience; we’ll have a hunt out o’ this.”
Then came another and longer squeal as Patience plunged out of sight
again, and then, as the glowing chorus rose from the half-seen pack, a
whip, posted on a hillside beyond the covert, raised his cap high in the
air, and a wild screech that set Pilot dancing from leg to leg broke
from a country boy who was driving a harrow in the next field: “Ga--aane
awa--ay!”
Mrs. Pat forgot her annoyances. Her time had come. She would show that
idiot Booth that Pilot was not to be insulted with impunity, and--But
here retrospect and intention became alike merged in the present, and in
the single resolve to get ahead and stay there. Half a dozen of Pilot’s
great reaching strides, and she was in the next field and over the low
bank without putting an iron on it. The horse with the harrow, deserted
by his driver, was following the hunt with the best of them, and,
combining business with pleasure, was, as he went, harrowing the field
with absurd energy. The Paste Brooch and the Shelburne Porter--so Mrs.
Pat mentally distinguished them--were sailing along with a good start,
and Major Booth was close at their heels. The light soil of the tilled
field flew in every direction as thirty or more horses raced across it,
and the usual retinue of foot runners raised an ecstatic yell as Mrs.
Pat forged ahead and sent her big horse over the fence at the end of the
field in a style that happily combined swagger with knowledge.
The hounds were streaking along over a succession of pasture fields, and
the cattle gaps which were to be found in every fence vexed the proud
soul of Mrs. Pat. She was too good a sportswoman to school her horse
over needless jumps when hounds were running, but it infuriated her to
have to hustle with these outsiders for her place at a gap. So she
complained to Major Booth, with a vehemence of adjective that, though it
may be forgiven to her, need not be set down here.
“Is _all_ the wretched country like this?” she inquired indignantly, as
the Shelburne Porter’s pony splashed ahead of her through a muddy ford,
just beyond which the hounds had momentarily checked; “you told me to
bring out a big-jumped horse, and I might have gone the whole hunt on a
bicycle!”
Major Booth’s reply was to point to the hounds. They had cast back to
the line that they had flashed over, and had begun to run again at
right angles from the grassy valley down which they had come, up towards
the heather-clad hills that lay back of Carnfother.
“Say your prayers, Mrs. Pat!” he said, in what Mrs. Pat felt to be a
gratuitously offensive manner, “and I’ll ask the lady in the pretty blue
habit to have an eye to you. This is a hill fox and he’s going to make
you and Pilot sit up!”
Mrs. Pat was not in a mood to be trifled with, and I again think it
better to omit her response to this inconvenient jesting. What she did
was to give Pilot his head, and she presently found herself as near the
hounds as was necessary, galloping in a line with the huntsman straight
for a three-foot wall, lightly built of round stones. That her horse
could refuse to jump it was a possibility that did not so much as enter
her head; but that he did so was a fact whose stern logic could not be
gainsaid. She had too firm a seat to be discomposed by the swinging
plunge with which he turned from it, but her mental balance sustained a
serious shake. That Pilot, at the head of the hunt should refuse, was a
thing that struck at the root of her dearest beliefs. She stopped him
and turned him at the wall again; again he refused, and at the same
instant Major Booth and the blue habit jumped it side by side.
“What did I tell you!” the former called back, with a laugh that grated
on Mrs. Pat’s ear with a truly fiendish rasp; “do you want a lead?”
The incensed Mrs. Pat once more replied in forcible phraseology, as she
drove her horse again at the wall. The average Meath horse likes stones
just about as much as the average Co. Cork horse enjoys water, and the
train of running men and boys were given the exquisite gratification of
a contest between Pilot and his rider.
“Howld on, miss, till I knock a few shtones for ye!” volunteered one,
trying to interpose between Pilot and the wall.
“Get out of the way!” was Mrs. Pat’s response to this civility, as she
crammed her steed at the jump again. The volunteer, amid roars of
laughter from his friends, saved his life only by dint of undignified
agility, as the big horse whirled round, rearing and plunging.
“Isn’t he the divil painted?” exclaimed another in highest admiration;
“wait till I give him a couple of slaps of my bawneen, miss!” He dragged
off his white flannel coat and attacked Pilot in the rear with it, while
another of the party flung clods of mud vaguely into the battle, and
another persistently implored the maddened Mrs. Pat to get off and let
him lead the horse over “before she’d lose her life:” a suggestion that
has perhaps a more thoroughly exasperating effect than any other on
occasions such as this.
By the time that Pilot had pawed down half the wall and been induced to
buck over, or into, what remained of it, Mrs. Pat’s temper was
irretrievably gone, and she was at the heel instead of the head of the
hunt. Thanks to this position there was bestowed on her the abhorred,
but not to be declined, advantage of availing herself of the gaps made
in the next couple of jumps by the other riders; but the stones they had
kicked down were almost as agitating to Pilot’s ruffled nerves as those
that still remained in position. She found it the last straw that she
should have to wait for the obsequious runners to tear these out of her
way, while the galloping backs in front of her grew smaller and smaller,
and the adulatory condolences of her assistants became more and more
hard to endure. She literally hurled the shilling at them as she set off
once more to try to recover her lost ground, and by sheer force of
passion hustled Pilot over the next broken-down wall without a refusal.
For she had now got into that stony country whereof Major Booth had
spoken. Rough heathery fields, ribbed with rocks and sown with grey
boulders, were all round. The broad salmon river swept sleekly through
the valley below, among the bland green fields which were as far away
for all practical purposes as the plains of Paradise. No one who has
not ridden a stern chase over rough ground on a well-bred horse with his
temper a bit out of hand will be able at all fitly to sympathise with
the trials of Mrs. Naylor. The hunt and all that appertained to it had
sunk out of sight over a rugged hillside, and she had nothing by which
to steer her course save the hoof-marks in the occasional black and
boggy intervals between the heathery knolls. No one had ever accused her
of being short of pluck, and she pressed on her difficult way with the
utmost gallantry; but short of temper she certainly was, and at each
succeeding obstacle there ensued a more bitter battle between her and
her horse. Every here and there a band of crisp upland meadow would give
the latter a chance, but each such advantage would be squandered in the
war dance that he indulged in at every wall.
At last the summit of the interminable series of hills was gained, and
Mrs. Pat scanned the solitudes that surrounded her with wrathful eyes.
The hounds were lost, as completely swallowed up as ever were Korah,
Dathan and Abiram. Not the most despised of the habits or the feeblest
of the three-year-olds had been left behind to give a hint of their
course; but the hoof-marks showed black on a marshy down-grade of grass,
and with an angry clout of her crop on Pilot’s unaccustomed ribs, she
set off again. A narrow road cut across the hills at the end of the
field. The latter was divided from it by a low, thin wall of sharp slaty
stones, and on the further side there was a wide and boggy drain. It was
not a nice place, and Pilot thundered down towards it at a pace that
suited his rider’s temper better than her judgment. It was evident, at
all events, that he did not mean to refuse. Nor did he; he rose out of
the heavy ground at the wall like a rocketing pheasant, and cleared it
by more than twice its height; but though he jumped high he did not jump
wide, and he landed half in and out of the drain, with his forefeet
clawing at its greasy edge, and his hind legs deep in the black mud.
Mrs. Pat scrambled out of the saddle with the speed of light, and after
a few momentous seconds, during which it seemed horribly likely that the
horse would relapse bodily into the drain, his and Mrs. Pat’s efforts
prevailed, and he was standing, trembling, and dripping, on the narrow
road. She led him on for a few steps; he went sound, and for one
delusive instant she thought he had escaped damage; then, through the
black slime on one of his hind legs the red blood began to flow. It came
from high up inside the off hind leg, above the hock, and it welled ever
faster and faster, a plaited crimson stream that made his owner’s heart
sink. She dipped her handkerchief in the ditch and cleaned the cut. It
was deep in the fleshy part of the leg, a gaping wound, inflicted by one
of those razor slates that hide like sentient enemies in such boggy
places. It was large enough for her to put her hand in; she held the
edges together, and the bleeding ceased for an instant; then, as she
released them, it began again worse than ever. Her handkerchief was as
inadequate for any practical purpose as ladies’ handkerchiefs generally
are, but an inspiration came to her. She tore off her gloves, and in a
few seconds the long linen hunting-scarf that had been pinned and tied
with such skilled labour in the morning was being used as a bandage for
the wound. But though Mrs. Pat could tie a tie with any man in the
regiment, she failed badly as a bandager of a less ornamental character.
The hateful stream continued to pump forth from the cut, incarnadining
the muddy road, and in despair she took Pilot by the head and began to
lead him down the hill towards the valley.
Another gusty shower flung itself at her. It struck her bare white neck
with whips of ice, and though she turned up the collar of her coat, the
rain ran down under the neckband of her shirt and chilled her through
and through. It was evident that an artery had been cut in Pilot’s leg;
the flow from the wound never ceased; the hunting-scarf drenched with
blood, had slipped down to the hock. It seemed to Mrs. Pat that her
horse must bleed to death, and, tough and unemotional though she was,
Pilot was very near her heart; tears gathered in her eyes as she led him
slowly on through the rain and the loneliness, in the forlorn hope of
finding help. She progressed in this lamentable manner for perhaps half
a mile; the rain ceased, and she stopped to try once more to readjust
the scarf, when, in the stillness that had followed the cessation of the
rain, she heard a faint and distant sound of music. It drew nearer, a
thin, shrill twittering, and as Mrs. Pat turned quickly from her task to
see what this could portend, she heard a woman’s voice say harshly:--
“Ah, have done with that thrash of music; sure, it’ll be dark night
itself before we’re in to Lismore.”
There was something familiar in the coarse tones. The weirdness fell
from the wail of the music as Mrs. Pat remembered the woman who had
bothered her for money that morning in Carnfother. She and the blind old
man were tramping slowly up the road, seemingly as useless a couple to
any one in Mrs. Pat’s plight as could well be imagined.
“How far am I from Carnfother?” she asked, as they drew near to her. “Is
there any house near here?”
“There is not,” said the yellow-haired woman; “and ye’re four miles from
Carnfother yet.”
“I’ll pay you well if you will take a message there for me--” began Mrs.
Pat.
“Are ye sure have ye yer purse in yer pocket?” interrupted the
yellow-haired woman with a laugh that succeeded in being as nasty as she
wished; “or will I go dancin’ down to Carnfother--”
“Have done, Joanna!” said the old man suddenly; “what trouble is on the
lady? What lamed the horse?”
He turned his bright blind eyes full on Mrs. Pat. They were of the
curious green blue that is sometimes seen in the eyes of a grey collie,
and with all Mrs. Pat’s dislike and suspicion of the couple, she knew
that he was blind.
“He was cut in a ditch,” she said shortly.
The old man had placed his fiddle in his daughter’s hands; his own hands
were twitching and trembling.
“I feel the blood flowing,” he said in a very low voice, and he walked
up to Pilot.
His hands went unguided to the wound, from which the steady flow of
blood had never ceased. With one he closed the lips of the cut, while
with the other he crossed himself three times. His daughter watched him
stolidly; Mrs. Pat, with a certain alarm, having, after the manner of
her kind, explained to herself the incomprehensible with the
all-embracing formula of madness. Yes, she thought, he was undoubtedly
mad, and as soon as the paroxysm was past she would have another try at
bribing the woman.
The old man was muttering to himself, still holding the wound in one
hand. Mrs. Pat could distinguish no words, but it seemed to her that he
repeated three times what he was saying. Then he straightened himself
and stroked Pilot’s quarter with a light, pitying hand. Mrs. Pat stared.
The bleeding had ceased. The hunting-scarf lay on the road at the
horse’s empurpled hoof. There was nothing to explain the mystery, but
the fact remained.
“He’ll do now,” said the blind man. “Take him on to Carnfother; but
ye’ll want to get five stitches in that to make a good job of it.”
“But--I don’t understand--” stammered Mrs. Pat, shaken for once out of
her self-possession by this sudden extension of her spiritual horizon.
“What have you done? Won’t it begin again?” She turned to the woman in
her bewilderment: “Is--is he mad?”
“For as mad as he is, it’s him you may thank for yer horse,” answered
the yellow-haired woman. “Why, Holy Mother! did ye never hear of Kane
the Blood-Healer?”
[Illustration: THE BLOOD-HEALER.]
The road round them was suddenly thronged with hounds, snuffing at
Pilot, and pushing between Mrs. Pat and the fence. The cheerful
familiar sound of the huntsman’s voice rating them made her feel her
feet on solid ground again. In a moment Major Booth was there, the
Master had dismounted, the habits, loud with sympathy and excitement,
had gathered round; a Whip was examining the cut, while he spoke to the
yellow-haired woman.
Mrs. Pat tie-less, her face splashed with mud, her bare hands stained
with blood, told her story. It is, I think, a point in her favour that
for a moment she forgot what her appearance must be.
“The horse would have bled to death before the lady got to Carnfother,
sir,” said the Whip to the Master; “it isn’t the first time I seen life
saved by that one. Sure, didn’t I see him heal a man that got his leg in
a mowing machine, and he half-dead, with the blood spouting out of him
like two rainbows!”
This is not a fairy story. Neither need it be set lightly down as a
curious coincidence. I know the charm that the old man said. I cannot
give it here. It will only work successfully if taught by man to woman
or by woman to man; nor do I pretend to say that it will work for every
one. I believe it to be a personal and wholly incomprehensible gift, but
that such a gift has been bestowed, and in more parts of Ireland than
one, is a bewildering and indisputable fact.
HIGH TEA AT McKEOWN’S
“Papa!” said the youngest Miss Purcell, aged eleven, entering the
drawing-room at Mount Purcell in a high state of indignation and a
flannel dressing-gown that had descended to her in unbroken line of
succession from her eldest sister, “isn’t it my turn for the foxy mare
to-morrow? Nora had her at Kilmacabee, and it’s a rotten shame--”
The youngest Miss Purcell here showed signs of the imminence of tears,
and rooted in the torn pocket of the dressing-gown for the hereditary
pocket-handkerchief that went with it.
Sir Thomas paused in the act of cutting the end off a long cigar, and
said briefly:--
“Neither of you’ll get her. She’s going ploughing the Craughmore.”
The youngest Miss Purcell knew as well as her sister Nora that the
latter had already commandeered the foxy mare, and, with the connivance
of the cowboy, had concealed her in the cow-house; but her sense of
tribal honour, stimulated by her sister’s threatening eye, withheld her
from opening this branch of the subject.
“Well, but Johnny Mulcahy won’t plough to-morrow because he’s going to
the Donovan child’s funeral. Tommy Brien’s just told me so, and he’ll be
drunk when he comes back, and to-morrow’ll be the first day that Carnage
and Trumpeter are going out--”
The youngest Miss Purcell paused, and uttered a loud sob.
“My darling baby,” remonstrated Lady Purcell from behind a reading-lamp,
“you really ought not to run about the stable-yard at this hour of the
night, or, indeed, at any other time!”
“Baby’s always bothering to come out hunting,” remarked an elder sister,
“and you know yourself, mamma, that the last time she came was when she
stole the postman’s pony, and he had to run all the way to Drinagh, and
you said yourself she was to be kept in the next day for a punishment.”
“How ready you are with your punishments! What is it to you if she goes
out or no?” demanded Sir Thomas, whose temper was always within easy
reach.
“She can have the cob, Tom,” interposed stout and sympathetic Lady
Purcell, on whom the tears of her youngest born were having their wonted
effect, “I’ll take the donkey chaise if I go out.”
“The cob is it?” responded Sir Thomas, in the stalwart brogue in which
he usually expressed himself. “The cob has a leg on him as big as your
own since the last day one of them had him out!” The master of the
house looked round with exceeding disfavour on his eight good-looking
daughters. “However, I suppose it’s as good to be hanged for a sheep as
a lamb, and if you don’t want him--”
The youngest Miss Purcell swiftly returned her handkerchief to her
pocket, and left the room before any change of opinion was possible.
Mount Purcell was one of those households that deserve to be subsidised
by any country neighbourhood in consideration of their unfailing supply
of topics of conversation. Sir Thomas was a man of old family, of good
income and of sufficient education, who, while reserving the power of
comporting himself like a gentleman, preferred as a rule to assimilate
his demeanour to that of one of his own tenants (with whom, it may be
mentioned, he was extremely popular). Many young men habitually dined
out on Sir Thomas’s brogue and his unwearying efforts to dispose of his
eight daughters.
His wife was a handsome, amiable, and by no means unintelligent lady
upon whose back the eight daughters had ploughed and had left long
furrows. She was not infrequently spoken of as “that un_for_tunate Lady
Purcell!” with a greater or less broadening of the accent on the second
syllable according to the social standard of the speaker. Her tastes
were comprehended and sympathised with by her gardener, and by the
clerk at Mudie’s who refilled her box. The view taken of her by her
husband and family was mainly a negative one, and was tinged throughout
by the facts that she was afraid to drive anything more ambitious than
the donkey, and had been known to mistake the kennel terrier for a hound
puppy. She had succeeded in transmitting to her daughters her very
successful complexion and blue eyes, but her responsibility for them had
apparently gone no further. The Misses Purcell faced the world and its
somewhat excessive interest in them with the intrepid _esprit de corps_
of a square of British infantry, but among themselves they fought, as
the coachman was wont to say--and no one knew better than the
coachman--“both bitther an regular, like man and wife!” They ranged in
age from about five and twenty downwards, sportswomen, warriors, and
buccaneers, all of them, and it would be difficult to determine whether
resentment or a certain secret pride bulked the larger in their male
parent’s mind in connection with them.
“Are you going to draw Clashnacrona to-morrow?” asked Muriel, the second
of the gang (Lady Purcell, it should have been mentioned, had also been
responsible for her daughters’ names), rising from her chair and pouring
what was left of her after dinner coffee into her saucer, a proceeding
which caused four pairs of lambent eyes to discover themselves in the
coiled mat of red setters that occupied the drawing-room hearthrug.
“No, I am not,” said Sir Thomas, “and, what’s more, I’m coming in early.
I’m a fool to go hunting at all at this time o’ year, with half the
potatoes not out of the ground.” He rose, and using the toe of his boot
as the coulter of a plough, made a way for himself among the dogs to the
centre of the hearthrug. “Be hanged to these dogs! I declare I don’t
know am I more plagued with dogs or daughters! Lucy!”
Lady Purcell dutifully disinterred her attention from a catalogue of
Dutch bulbs.
“When I get in to-morrow I’ll go call on that Local Government Board
Inspector who’s staying in Drinagh. They tell me he’s a very nice fellow
and he’s rolling in money. I daresay I’ll ask him to dinner. He was in
the army one time, I believe. They often give these jobs to soldiers. If
any of you girls come across him,” he continued, bending his fierce
eyebrows upon his family, “I’ll trouble you to be civil to him and show
him none of your infernal airs because he happens to be an Englishman! I
hear he’s bicycling all over the country and he might come out to see
the hounds.”
Rosamund, the eldest, delivered herself of an almost imperceptible wink
in the direction of Violet, the third of the party. Sir Thomas’s
diplomacies were thoroughly appreciated by his offspring. “It’s time
some of you were cleared out from under my feet!” he told them.
Nevertheless when, some four or five years before, a subaltern of
Engineers engaged on the Government survey of Ireland had laid his
career, plus fifty pounds per annum and some impalpable expectations, at
the feet of Muriel, the clearance effected by Sir Thomas had been that
of Lieutenant Aubrey Hamilton. “Is it marry one of my daughters to that
penniless pup!” he had said to Lady Purcell, whose sympathies had, as
usual, been on the side of the detrimental. “Upon my honour, Lucy,
you’re a bigger fool than I thought you--and that’s saying a good deal!”
It was near the beginning of September, and but a sleepy half dozen or
so of riders had turned out to meet the hounds the following morning, at
Liss Cranny Wood. There had been rain during the night and, though it
had ceased, a wild wet wind was blowing hard from the north-west. The
yellowing beech trees twisted and swung their grey arms in the gale.
Hats flew down the wind like driven grouse; Sir Thomas’s voice, in the
middle of the covert, came to the riders assembled at the cross roads on
the outskirts of the wood in gusts, fitful indeed, but not so fitful
that Nora, on the distrained foxy mare, was not able to gauge to a
nicety the state of his temper. From the fact of her unostentatious
position in the rear it might safely be concluded that it, like the
wind, was still rising. The riders huddled together in the lee of the
trees, their various elements fused in the crucible of Sir Thomas’s
wrath into a compact and anxious mass. There had been an unusually large
entry of puppies that season, and Sir Thomas’s temper, never at its best
on a morning of cubbing, was making exhaustive demands on his stock of
expletives. Rabbits were flying about in every direction, each with a
shrieking puppy or two in its wake. Jerry, the Whip, was galloping
_ventre à terre_ along the road in the vain endeavour to overtake a
couple in headlong flight to the farm where they had spent their happier
earlier days. At the other side of the wood the Master was blowing
himself into apoplexy in the attempt to recall half a dozen who were
away in full cry after a cur-dog, and a zealous member of the hunt
looked as if he were playing polo with another puppy that doubled and
dodged to evade the lash and the duty of getting to covert. Hither and
thither among the beech trees went that selection from the Master’s
family circle, exclusive of the furtive Nora, that had on this occasion
taken the field. It was a tradition in the country that there were never
fewer than four Miss Purcells out, and that no individual Miss Purcell
had more than three days’ hunting in the season. Whatever may have been
the truth of this, the companion legend that each Miss Purcell slept
with two hound puppies in her bed was plausibly upheld by the devotion
with which the latter clung to the heels of their nurses.
In the midst of these scenes of disorder an old fox rightly judging that
this was no place for him, slid out of the covert, and crossed the road
just in front of where Nora, in a blue serge skirt and a red
Tam-o’-Shanter cap, lurked on the foxy mare. Close after him came four
or five couple of old hounds, and, prominent among her elders, yelped
the puppy that had been Nora’s special charge. This was not cubbing, and
no one knew it better than Nora; but the sight of Carnage among the
prophets--Carnage, whose noblest quarry hitherto had been the Mount
Purcell turkey-cock--overthrew her scruples. The foxy mare, a ponderous
creature, with a mane like a Nubian lion and a mouth like steel,
required nearly as much room to turn in as a man-of-war, and while Nora,
by vigorous use of her heel and a reliable ash plant, was getting her
head round, her sister Muriel, on a raw-boned well-bred colt--Sir
Thomas, as he said, made the best of a bad job, and utilised his
daughters as roughriders--shot past her down the leafy road, closely
followed by a stranger on a weedy bay horse, which Nora instantly
recognised as the solitary hireling of the neighbourhood.
Through the belt of wood and out into the open country went the five
couple, and after them went Muriel, Nora and the strange man. There had
been an instant when the colt had thought that it seemed a pity to leave
the road, but, none the less, he had the next instant found himself in
the air, a considerable distance above a low stone wall, with a tingling
streak across his ribs, and a bewildering sensation of having been
hustled. The field in which he alighted was a sloping one and he ramped
down it very enjoyably to himself, with all the weight of his sixteen
hands and a half concentrated in his head, when suddenly a tall grassy
bank confronted him, with, as he perceived with horror, a ditch in front
of it. He tried to swerve, but there seemed something irrevocable about
the way in which the bank faced him, and if his method of “changing
feet” was not strictly conventional, he achieved the main point and
found all four safely under him when he landed, which was as much--if
not more than as much--as either he or Muriel expected. The Miss
Purcells were a practical people, and were thankful for minor mercies.
It was at about this point that the stranger on the hireling drew level;
he had not been at the meet, and Muriel turned her head to see who it
was that was kicking old McConnell’s screw along so well. He lifted his
cap, but he was certainly a stranger. She saw a discreetly clipped and
pointed brown beard, with a rather long and curling moustache.
“Fed on furze!” thought Muriel, with a remembrance of the foxy mare’s
upper lip when she came in “off the hill”.
Then she met the strange man’s eyes--was he quite a stranger? What was
it about the greeny-grey gleam of them that made her heart give a
curious lift, and then sent the colour running from it to her face and
back again to her heart?
“I thought you were going to cut me--Muriel!” said the strange man.
In the meantime the five couple and Carnage were screaming down the
heathery side of Liss Cranny Hill, on a scent that was a real comfort to
them after nearly five miserable months of kennels and road-work, and a
glorious wind under their sterns. Jerry, the Whip, was riding like a
madman to stop them; they knew that well, and went the faster for it.
Sir Thomas was blowing his horn inside out. But Jerry was four fields
behind, and Sir Thomas was on the wrong side of the wood, and Miss
Muriel and the strange gentleman were coming on for all they were worth,
and were as obviously bent on having a good time as they were. Carnage
flung up her handsome head and squealed with pure joy, as she pitched
herself over the big bounds fence at the foot of the hill, and flopped
across the squashy ditch on the far side. There was grass under her now,
beautiful firm dairy grass, and that entrancing perfume was lying on it
as thick as butter--Oh! it was well to be hunting! thought Carnage, with
another most childish shriek, legging it after her father and mother and
several other blood relations in a way that did Muriel’s heart good to
see.
The fox, as good luck would have it, had chosen the very pick of Sir
Thomas’s country, and Muriel and the stranger had it all to themselves.
She looked over her shoulder. Away back in a half-dug potato field Nora
and a knot of labourers were engaged in bitter conflict with the foxy
mare on the subject of a bank with a rivulet in front of it. To refuse
to jump running water had been from girlhood the resolve of the foxy
mare; it was plain that neither Nora’s ash plant, nor the stalks of
rag-wort, torn from the potato ridges, with which the countrymen
flagellated her from behind, were likely to make her change her mind.
Farther back still were a few specks, motionless apparently, but
representing, as Muriel was well aware, the speeding indignant forms of
those Miss Purcells who had got left. As for Sir Thomas--well, it was no
good going to meet the devil half-way! was the filial reflection of
Sir Thomas’s second daughter, as, with a clatter of stones, she and the
colt dropped into a road, and charged on over the bank on the other
side, the colt leaving a hind leg behind him in it, and sending thereby
a clod of earth flying into the stranger’s face. The stranger only
laughed, and catching hold of the much enduring hireling he drove him
level with the colt, and lifted him over the ensuing bank and gripe in a
way subsequently described by Jerry as having “covered acres”.
But the old fox’s hitherto straight neck was getting a twist in it.
Possibly he had summered himself rather too well, and found himself a
little short of training for the point that he had first fixed on. At
all events, he swung steadily round, and headed for the lower end of the
long belt of Liss Cranny Wood; and, as he and his pursuers so headed,
Retributive Justice, mounted on a large brown horse, very red in the
face, and followed by a string of hounds and daughters, galloped
steadily toward the returning sinners.
It is probably superfluous to reproduce for sporting readers the exact
terms in which an infuriated master of hounds reproves an erring flock.
Sir Thomas, even under ordinary circumstances, had a stirring gift of
invective. It was currently reported that after each day’s hunting Lady
Purcell made a house-to-house visitation of conciliation to all
subscribers of five pounds and upwards. On this occasion the Master,
having ordered his two daughters home without an instant’s delay,
proceeded to a satiric appreciation of the situation at large and in
detail, with general reflections as to the advantage to tailors of
sticking to their own trade, and direct references of so pointed a
character to the mental abilities of the third delinquent, that that
gentleman’s self-control became unequal to further strain, and he also
retired abruptly from the scene.
Nora and Muriel meanwhile pursued their humbled, but unrepentant, way
home. It was blowing as hard as ever. Muriel’s hair had only been saved
from complete overthrow by two hair-pins yielded, with pelican-like
devotion, by a sister. Nora had lost the Tam-o’-Shanter, and had torn
her blue serge skirt. The foxy mare had cast a shoe, and the colt was
unaffectedly done.
“He’s mad for a drink!” said Muriel, as he strained towards the side of
the bog road, against which the waters of a small lake, swollen by the
recent rains, were washing in little waves under the lash of the
wind--“I think I’ll let him just wet his mouth.”
She slackened the reins, and the thirsty colt eagerly thrust his muzzle
into the water. As he did so he took another forward step, and
instantly, with a terrific splash, he and his rider were floundering in
brown water up to his withers in the ditch below the submerged edge of
the road. To Muriel’s credit, it must be said that she bore this
unlooked-for immersion with the nerve of a Baptist convert. In a second
she had pulled the colt round parallel with the bank, and in another she
had hurled herself from the saddle and was dragging herself, like a
wounded otter, up on to the level of the road.
“Well you’ve done it now, Muriel!” said Nora dispassionately. “How
pleased Sir Thomas will be when the colt begins to cough to-morrow
morning! He’s bound to catch cold out of this. Look out! Here’s that man
that went the run with us. I’d try and wipe some of the mud off my face
if I were you!”
A younger sister of fifteen is not apt to err on the side of over
sympathy, but the deficiencies of Nora were more than made up for by the
solicitude of the stranger with the pointed beard. He hauled the colt
from his watery nest, he dried him down with handfuls of rushes, he
wiped the saddle with his own beautiful silk pocket-handkerchief. For a
stranger he displayed--so it struck Nora--a surprising knowledge of the
locality. He pointed out that Mount Purcell was seven miles away, and
that the village of Drinagh, where he was putting up--(“Oho! so he’s the
inspector Sir Thomas was going to be so civil to!” thought the younger
Miss Purcell with an inward grin)--was only two or three miles away.
“You know, Nora,” said Muriel with an unusually conciliatory manner, “it
isn’t at all out of our way, and the colt _ought_ to get a proper rub
down and a hot drink.”
“I should have thought he’d had about as much to drink as he wanted, hot
or cold!” said Nora.
But Nora had not been a younger sister for fifteen years for nothing,
and it was for Drinagh that the party steered their course.
Their arrival stirred McKeown’s Hotel (so-called) to its depths. Destiny
had decreed that Mrs. McKeown, being, as she expressed it, “an epicure
about boots,” should choose this day of all others to go to “town” to
buy herself a pair, leaving the direction of the hotel in the hands of
her husband, a person of minor importance, and of Mary Ann Whooly, a
grey-haired kitchen-maid, who milked the cows and made the beds, and at
a distance in the back-yard was scarcely distinguishable from the
surrounding heaps of manure.
[Illustration: “THE GREY-HAIRED KITCHEN-MAID.”]
The Inspector’s hospitality knew no limits, and failed to recognise that
those of McKeown’s Hotel were somewhat circumscribed. He ordered hot
whisky and water, mutton chops, dry clothes for Miss Purcell, fires,
tea, buttered toast, poached eggs and other delicacies simultaneously
and immediately, and the voice of Mary Ann Whooly imploring Heaven’s
help for herself and its vengeance upon her inadequate assistants was
heard far in the streets of Drinagh.
“Sure herself” (herself was Mrs. McKeown) “has her box locked agin me,
and I’ve no clothes but what’s on me!” she protested, producing after a
long interval a large brown shawl and a sallow-complexioned blanket,
“but the Captain’s after sending these. Faith, they’ll do ye grand!
Arrah, why not, asthore! Sure he’ll never look at ye!”
These consisted of a long covert coat, a still longer pair of yellow
knitted stockings, and a pair of pumps.
“Sure they’re the only best we have,” continued Mary Ann Whooly,
pooling, as it were, her wardrobe with that of the lodger. “God’s will
must be, Miss Muriel, my darlin’ gerr’l!”
It says a good deal for the skill of Nora as a tire-woman that her
sister’s appearance ten minutes afterwards was open to no reproach, save
possibly that of eccentricity, and the Inspector’s gaze--which struck
the tire-woman as being of a singularly enamoured character for so brief
an acquaintance--was so firmly fixed upon her sister’s countenance that
nothing else seemed to signify. It was by this time past two o’clock,
and the repast, which arrived in successive relays, had, at all events,
the merit of combining the leading features of breakfast, lunch and
afternoon tea in one remarkable procession, Julia Connolly, having
inaugurated the entertainment with tumblers of dark brown steaming
whisky and water, was impelled from strength to strength by her growing
sense of the greatness of the occasion, and it would be hard to say
whether the younger Miss Purcell was more gratified by the mound of
feather-light pancakes which followed on the tea and buttered toast, or
by the almost cringing politeness of her elder sister.
“How civil she is!” thought Nora scornfully; “for all she’s so civil
she’ll have to lend me her saddle next week, or I’ll tell them the whole
story!” (Them meant the sisterhood.) “I bet he was holding her hand just
before the pancakes came in!”
At about this time Lady Purcell, pursuing her peaceful way home in her
donkey chaise, was startled by the sound of neighing and by the rattle
of galloping hoofs behind her, and her consternation may be imagined
when the foxy mare and the colt, saddled but riderless, suddenly ranged
up one on either side of her chaise. Having stopped themselves with one
or two prodigious bounds that sent the mud flying in every direction,
they proceeded to lively demonstrations of friendship towards the
donkey, which that respectable animal received with every symptom of
annoyance. Lady Purcell had never in her life succeeded in knowing one
horse from another, and what horses these were she had not the faintest
idea; but the side saddles were suggestive of her Amazon brood; she
perceived that one of the horses had been under water, and by the time
she had arrived at her own hall door, with the couple still in close
attendance upon her, anxiety as to the fate of her daughters and
exhaustion from much scourging of the donkey, upon whom the heavy
coquetries of the foxy mare had had a most souring effect, rendered the
poor lady but just capable of asking if Sir Thomas had returned.
“He is, my Lady, but he’s just after going down to the farm, and he’s
going on to call on the English gentleman that’s at Mrs. McKeown’s.”
“And the young ladies?” gasped Lady Purcell.
The answer suited with her fears. Lady Purcell was not wont to take the
initiative, still less one of her husband’s horses, without his
approval; but the thought of the saturated side-saddle lent her
decision, and as soon as a horse and trap could be got ready she set
forth for Drinagh.
It need not for a moment be feared that such experienced campaigners as
the Misses Muriel and Nora Purcell had forgotten that their father had
settled to call upon their temporary host, what time the business of the
morning should be ended, or that they had not arranged a sound scheme
of retirement, but when the news was brought to them that during the
absence of the stable-boy--“to borrow a half score of eggs and a lemon
for pancakes,” it was explained--their horses had broken forth from the
cowshed and disappeared, it may be admitted that even their stout hearts
quailed.
“Oh, it will be all right!” the Inspector assured them, with the easy
optimism of the looker-on in domestic tragedy; “your father will see
there was nothing else for you to do.”
“That’s all jolly fine,” returned Nora, “but _I’m_ going out to borrow
Casey’s car” (Casey was the butcher), “and I’ll just tell old Mary Ann
to keep a sharp look out for Sir Thomas, and give us warning in time.”
It is superfluous to this simple tale to narrate the conversation that
befel on the departure of Nora. It was chiefly of a retrospective
character, with disquisitions on such abstractions as the consolations
that sometimes follow on the loss of a wealthy great-aunt, the
difficulties of shaving with a “tennis elbow,” the unchanging quality of
certain emotions. This later topic was still under discussion when Nora
burst into the room.
“Here’s Sir Thomas!” she panted. “Muriel, fly! There’s no time to get
downstairs, but Mary Ann Whooly said we could go into the room off this
sitting-room till he’s gone.”
Flight is hardly the term to be applied to the second Miss Purcell’s
retreat, and it says a good deal for the Inspector’s mental collapse
that he saw nothing ludicrous in her retreating back, clad as it was in
his own covert coat, with a blanket like the garment of an Indian brave
trailing beneath it. Nora tore open a door near the fireplace, and
revealed a tiny room containing a table, a broken chair, and a heap of
feathers near an old feather bed on the floor.
“Get in, Muriel!” she cried.
They got in, and as the door closed on them Sir Thomas entered the room.
During the morning the identity of the stranger on whom he had poured
the vials of his wrath, with the Local Government Board Inspector whom
he was prepared to be delighted to honour, had been brought home to Sir
Thomas, and nothing could have been more handsome and complete than the
apology that he now tendered. He generously admitted the temptation
endured in seeing hounds get away with a good fox on a day devoted to
cubbing, and even went so far as to suggest that possibly Captain
Clarke--
“Hamilton-Clarke,” said the Inspector.
“Had ridden so hard in order to stop them.”
“Er--quite so,” said the Inspector.
Something caused the dressing-room door to rattle, and Captain
Hamilton-Clarke grew rather red.
“My wife and I hope,” continued Sir Thomas, urbanely, “that you will
come over to dine with us to-morrow evening, or possibly to-night.”
He stopped. A trap drove rapidly up to the door, and Lady Purcell’s
voice was heard agitatedly inquiring “if Miss Muriel and Miss Nora were
there? Casey had just told her--”
The rest of the sentence was lost.
“Why, that _is_ my wife!” said Sir Thomas. “What the deuce does she want
here?”
A strange sound came from behind the door of the dressing-room:
something between a stifled cry and a laugh. The Inspector’s ears became
as red as blood. Then from within there was heard a sort of rush, and
something fell against the door. There followed a wholly uncontrolled
yell and a crash, and the door was burst open.
It has, I think, been mentioned that in the corner of the dressing-room
in which the Misses Purcell had taken refuge there was on the floor the
remains of a feather bed. The feathers had come out through a ragged
hole in one corner of it; Nora, in the shock of hearing of Lady
Purcell’s arrival, trod on the corner of the bed and squeezed more of
the feathers out of it. A gush of fluff was the result, followed by a
curious and unaccountable movement in the bed, and then from the hole
there came forth a corpulent and very mangy old rat. Its face was grey
and scaly, and horrid pink patches adorned its fat person. It gave one
beady glance at Nora, and proceeded with hideous composure to lope
heavily across the floor towards the hole in the wall by which it had at
some bygone time entered the room. But the hole had been nailed up, and
as the rat turned to seek another way of escape the chair upon which
Muriel had incontinently sprung broke down, depositing her and her
voluminous draperies on top of the rat.
I cannot feel that Miss Purcell is to be blamed that at this moment all
power of self-control, of reason almost, forsook her. Regardless of
every other consideration, she snatched the blankets and the covert-coat
skirts into one massive handful, and with, as has been indicated, a yell
of housemaid stridency, flung herself against the door and dashed into
the sitting-room, closely followed by Nora, and rather less closely by
the rat. The latter alone retained its presence of mind, and without an
instant’s delay hurried across the room and retired by the half-open
door. Immediately from the narrow staircase there arose a series of
those acclaims that usually attend the progress of royalty, and, in
even an intenser degree, of rats. There came a masculine shout, a shrill
and ladylike scream, a howl from Mary Ann Whooly, accompanied by the
clang and rattle of a falling coal box, and then Lady Purcell, pale and
breathless, appeared at the doorway of the sitting-room.
“Sure the young ladies isn’t in the house at all, your ladyship!” cried
the pursuing voice of Mary Ann Whooly, faithful, even at this supreme
crisis, to a lost cause.
Lady Purcell heard her not. She was aware only of her daughter Muriel,
attired like a scarecrow in a cold climate, and of the attendant fact
that the arm of the Local Government Board Inspector was encircling
Muriel’s waist, as far as circumstances and a brown woollen shawl would
permit. Nora, leaning half-way out of the window, was calling at the top
of her voice for Sir Thomas’s terrier; Sir Thomas was very loudly saying
nothing in particular, much as an angry elderly dog barks into the
night. Lady Purcell wildly concluded that the party was rehearsing a
charade--the last scene of a very vulgar charade.
“Muriel!” she exclaimed, “_what_ have you got on you? And who--” She
paused and stared at the Inspector. “Good gracious!” she cried, “why,
it’s Aubrey Hamilton!”
THE BAGMAN’S PONY
When the regiment was at Delhi, a T.G. was sent to us from the 105th
Lancers, a bagman, as they call that sort of globe-trotting fellow that
knocks about from one place to another, and takes all the fun he can out
of it at other people’s expense. Scott in the 105th gave this bagman a
letter of introduction to me, told me that he was bringing down a horse
to run at the Delhi races; so, as a matter of course, I asked him to
stop with me for the week. It was a regular understood thing in India
then, this passing on the T.G. from one place to another; sometimes he
was all right, and sometimes he was a good deal the reverse--in any
case, you were bound to be hospitable, and afterwards you could, if you
liked, tell the man that sent him that you didn’t want any more from
him.
The bagman arrived in due course, with a rum-looking roan horse, called
the “Doctor”; a very good horse, too, but not quite so good as the
bagman gave out that he was. He brought along his own grass-cutter with
him, as one generally does in India, and the grass-cutter’s pony, a sort
of animal people get because he can carry two or three more of these
beastly clods of grass they dig up for horses than a man can, and
without much regard to other qualities. The bagman seemed a decentish
sort of chap in his way, but, my word! he did put his foot in it the
first night at mess; by George, he did! There was somehow an idea that
he belonged to a wine merchant business in England, and the Colonel
thought we’d better open our best cellar for the occasion, and so we
did; even got out the old Madeira, and told the usual story about the
number of times it had been round the Cape. The bagman took everything
that came his way, and held his tongue about it, which was rather
damping. At last, when it came to dessert and the Madeira, Carew, one of
our fellows, couldn’t stand it any longer--after all, it _is_
aggravating if a man won’t praise your best wine, no matter how little
you care about his opinion, and the bagman was supposed to be a
_connoisseur_.
“Not a bad glass of wine that,” says Carew to him; “what do you think of
it?”
“Not bad,” says the bagman, sipping it, “Think I’ll show you something
better in this line if you’ll come and dine with me in London when
you’re home next.”
“Thanks,” says Carew, getting as red as his own jacket, and beginning to
splutter--he always did when he got angry--“this is good enough for me,
and for most people here--”
“Oh, but nobody up here has got a palate left,” says the bagman,
laughing in a very superior sort of way.
“What do you mean, sir?” shouted Carew, jumping up. “I’ll not have any
d----d bagmen coming here to insult me!”
By George, if you’ll believe me, Carew had a false palate, with a little
bit of sponge in the middle, and we all knew it, _except the bagman_.
There was a frightful shindy, Carew wanting to have his blood, and all
the rest of us trying to prevent a row. We succeeded somehow in the end,
I don’t quite know how we managed it, as the bagman was very warlike
too; but, anyhow, when I was going to bed that night I saw them both in
the billiard room, very tight, leaning up against opposite ends of the
billiard table, and making shoves at the balls--with the wrong ends of
their cues, fortunately.
“He called me a d----d bagman,” says one, nearly tumbling down with
laughing.
“Told me I’d no palate,” says the other, putting his head down on the
table and giggling away there “best thing I ever heard in my life.”
Every one was as good friends as possible next day at the races, and for
the whole week as well. Unfortunately for the bagman his horse didn’t
pull off things in the way he expected, in fact he hadn’t a look in--we
just killed him from first to last. As things went on the bagman began
to look queer and by the end of the week he stood to lose a pretty
considerable lot of money, nearly all of it to me. The way we arranged
these matters then was a general settling-up day after the races were
over; every one squared up his books and planked ready money down on the
nail, or if he hadn’t got it he went and borrowed from some one else to
do it with. The bagman paid up what he owed the others, and I began to
feel a bit sorry for the fellow when he came to me that night to finish
up. He hummed and hawed a bit, and then asked if I should mind taking an
I.O.U. from him, as he was run out of the ready.
Of course I said, “All right, old man, certainly, just the same to me,”
though it’s usual in such cases to put down the hard cash, but
still--fellow staying in my house, you know--sent on by this pal of mine
in the 11th--absolutely nothing else to be done.
Next morning I was up and out on parade as usual, and in the natural
course of events began to look about for my bagman. By George, not a
sign of him in his room, not a sign of him anywhere. I thought to
myself, this is peculiar, and I went over to the stable to try whether
there was anything to be heard of him.
The first thing I saw was that the “Doctor’s” stall was empty.
“How’s this?” I said to the groom; “where’s Mr. Leggett’s horse?”
“The sahib has taken him away this morning.”
I began to have some notion then of what my I.O.U. was worth.
“The sahib has left his grass-cutter and his pony,” said the _sais_, who
probably had as good a notion of what was up as I had.
“All right, send for the grass-cutter,” I said.
The fellow came up, in a blue funk evidently, and I couldn’t make
anything of him. Sahib this, and sahib that, and salaaming and general
idiotcy--or shamming--I couldn’t tell which. I didn’t know a nigger then
as well as I do now.
“This is a very fishy business,” I thought to myself, “and I think it’s
well on the cards the grass-cutter will be out of this to-night on his
pony. No, by Jove, I’ll see what the pony’s good for before he does
that. Is the grass-cutter’s pony there?” I said to the _sais_.
“He is there, sahib, but he is only a _kattiawa tattoo_,” which is the
name for a common kind of mountain pony.
I had him out, and he certainly was a wretched-looking little brute, dun
with a black stripe down his back, like all that breed, and all bony and
ragged and starved.
“Indeed, he is a _gareeb kuch kam ki nahin_,” said the _sais_, meaning
thereby a miserable beast, in the most intensified form, “and not fit to
stand in the sahib’s stable.”
All the same, just for the fun of the thing, I put the grass-cutter up
on him, and told him to trot him up and down. By George! the pony went
like a flash of lightning! I had him galloped next; same thing--fellow
could hardly hold him. I opened my eyes, I can tell you, but no matter
what way I looked at him I couldn’t see where on earth he got his pace
from. It was there anyhow, there wasn’t a doubt about that. “That’ll
do,” I said, “put him up. And you just stay here,” I said to the
grass-cutter; “till I hear from Mr. Leggett where you’re to go to. Don’t
leave Delhi till you get orders from me.”
It got about during the day that the bagman had disappeared, and had had
a soft thing of it as far as I was concerned. The 112th were dining with
us that night, and they all set to work to draw me after dinner about
the business--thought themselves vastly witty over it.
“Hullo Paddy, so you’re the girl he left behind him!” “Hear he went off
with two suits of your clothes, one over the other.” “Cheer up, old man;
he’s left you the grass-cutter and the pony, and what _he_ leaves must
be worth having, I’ll bet!” and so on.
I suppose I’d had a good deal more than my share of the champagne, but
all of a sudden I began to feel pretty warm.
“You’re all d----d funny,” I said, “but I daresay you’ll find he’s left
me something that _is_ worth having.”
“Oh, yes!” “Go on!” “Paddy’s a great man when he’s drunk,” and a lot
more of the same sort.
“I tell you what it is,” said I, “I’ll back the pony he’s left here to
trot his twelve miles an hour on the road.”
“Bosh!” says Barclay of the 112th. “I’ve seen him, and I’ll lay you a
thousand rupees even he doesn’t.”
“Done!” said I, whacking my hand down on the table.
“And I’ll lay another thousand,” says another fellow.
“Done with you too,” said I.
Every one began to stare a bit then.
“Go to bed, Paddy,” says the Colonel, “you’re making an exhibition of
yourself.”
“Thank you, sir; I know pretty well what I’m talking about,” said I;
but, by George, I began privately to think I’d better pull myself
together a bit, and I got out my book and began to hedge--laid three to
one on the pony to do eleven miles in the hour, and four to one on him
to do ten--all the fellows delighted to get their money on. I was to
choose my own ground, and to have a fortnight to train the pony, and by
the time I went to bed I stood to lose about £1,000.
Somehow in the morning I didn’t feel quite so cheery about things--one
doesn’t after a big night--one gets nasty qualms, both mental and the
other kind. I went out to look after the pony, and the first thing I saw
by way of an appetiser was Biddy, with a face as long as my arm. Biddy,
I should explain, was a chap called Biddulph, in the Artillery; they
called him Biddy for short, and partly, too, because he kept a racing
stable with me in those days, I being called Paddy by every one, because
I was Irish--English idea of wit--Paddy and Biddy, you see.
“Well,” said he, “I hear you’ve about gone and done it this time. The
112th are going about with trumpets and shawms, and looking round for
ways to spend that thousand when they get it. There are to be new polo
ponies, a big luncheon, and a piece of plate bought for the mess, in
memory of that benefactor of the regiment, the departed bagman. Well,
now, let’s see the pony. That’s what I’ve come down for.”